The average station makes a profit of $60 at the pump per day, says Jeff Lenard, a spokesman for the National Association of Convenience Stores. “It’s not uncommon to lose money selling gas. So the idea of losing $20 or $50 [in charge backs] is too much.”
…
Stations “are faced with two bad options — allow the pump to go beyond $75 and risk not getting paid . . . or take a customer from frustrated [with gas prices] to outright anger,” Lenard said.

@simplegreen: At my regular station, they could probably increase profits if they only employed one cashier and two people smoking cigarettes out back instead of the one cashier and four people smoking out back.

My heart bleeds for those poor, unfortunate souls who drive full-size SUVs that use 25 gallons or more a week. It really does. NOT.

I use something like six gallons a week because I wasn’t one of those bozos who had to go buy a Tahoe for no better reason than that I could. In the 1990s, it was because I’m a cheap bastard. In the 2000s, it’s because I’m too smart to fall for GMC’s “it’s not more than you need…” BS.

@simplegreen: Here is a link to a NPR Report on where and how gas stations make their money.
Stations love it when after paying for your gas you get a soda/bottle of water and then a car wash from their little station wash.

I take it that you don’t live in hicktown, USA in the winter. Families use SUV’s/Trucks here for what they were made for. They live in the country and need to haul trailers among other things and in the winter that means a ton of mud and snow. Way to generalize everyone who buys these things. But I will agree people buying these things in the city is completely retarded unless they are building contractors who need to haul things.

I’m really confused about why this is a story. Is it about the terminal fees or about the chargeback liability or about SUV-wielding guys/girls who must fill in separate transactions or about low-profit-margin gasoline sales or what? Very poorly written.

Those $100 limits are typically not set by the individual gas station, but is rather a contracted limit between the payment processer, Visa/MC/Amex, and the station brand parent company (BP, Conoco, Exxon, etc.) $60 a day is probably right for the average station in fuel sales. Inside sales – such as candy bars – are how the station stays in business.

I drove from Jersey to Michigan last week and I could swear I saw something even worse at one of the stations on the Ohio Turnpike. It wasn’t a ‘Pay-at-the-Pump’ limit, but a general credit card limit, inside OR outside. It was $100 limit for any credit card except for their own branded card, which had a $150 limit.

@tom2133: Maybe for this station in particular. On my drive from Atlanta to Orlando yesterday, somewhere on the border of FL on 95 there was a similar sticker on the pump but it was 50$ for MC, VISA & 75 DISCO, 100 AMEX. I’d never seen anything like it before, I just thought it was FL being weird.

These $100 ceilings can put a temporary dent in a passenger car driver’s bank accounts if they use a debit card or check card. A lot of places will just charge the $100 as a pre-authorization. If you only put $40 in your tank but are hit with a pre-auth for $100, that can make cash tight for paycheck to paycheck customers for a few days.

And to make things a little worse, quite a few stations with the intent to prevent drive offs are making their pumps prepay or credit card only. So it’s either go inside and estimate an amount which may be wrong or go outside and have to run multiple transactions. Some systems even limit the number of outside transactions.

In the end, these systems were designed to make things more convenient for the station and customer. However, it’s quickly becoming the opposite.

It’s been this way for a while. I’ve got one of those “kick mother earth in the face” SUVs with a 31 gallon tank, so I’ve had to either do the two transaction pump, or just be satisfied with my $75 or $99 fill up.

And before I’m hung in effigy, I bought it because I am restoring an old house and need the cargo room, and I still have to move myself and my family as well.

QT or QuikTrips are great. They will issue you a “PumpStart” card. You insert it into the machine, then pump as much as you want. You pay when you are done and they only charge/authorize the amount you actually use.

Some other places like Loaf & Jug or Kwik Shop (Anything KROGER) actually authorize a set amount (like $75.00). When you are finished, it takes the money from your account but doesn’t release the authorization for 2-3 days. If you buy $30 in fuel, it ties up $105 in your account.

It would be nice if they could do something similar to QT since they issue shopper’s cards to everyone anyway.

This is why I use cash. I never buy that much gas at one time (I don’t think my car has a tank that big, but I never get it much lower than what the gauge calls a quarter), but I like the discount I get at the station I prefer, and I don’t have to worry about extreme holds.

Oddly enough, the cheapest gas station in town (the one I go to) is a kinda old looking place without any grocery or repair place connected. All there is to buy there is gas and compressed air. They undercut the other stations by a good 5 cents, so I don’t know how they do it if they really make under $60 a day. They’ve been around a while and have always been cheap, so I doubt they’re trying to cut their losses and sell as much gas as possible before they close up shop.

Disclaimer: I live in NJ and drive a PT Cruiser. NJ because it’s a nice place, the Cruiser because I could afford it.

@Sollus: I’ve always said that I have no problem with ranchers, farmers, etc. to buy the large vehicles because they’re actually being used for what they’re for. The number of people, though, who buy those vehicles and don’t need them is ridiculous. There’s probably equal or more number of people in the city whose hardest drive is going to be getting on the interstate and not hauling a ton of things like rural users.

You still have to go inside. When your card goes through a second time a code comes back alerting the clerk, they are supposed to ask you if you’ve used the card there earlier and if you say no then that means someone else has used your number. The clerk has to ack the code and let the transaction go through. so you have to go inside to do this. I had a resturaunt in a small town we were staying say a code came up when we went to pay for out dinner since we had ate breakfast there earlier that day and refused to accept my payment then even though I assured them I knew I had ate there for breakfast so this second charge was legit.

@enine: Well, every time I have done this in NJ, it went through. I think the computers at Visa or wherever are savvy to what is happening, and shouldn’t flag the transaction. When I worked at a gas station, we would only get a error message if we tried two transaction for the same amount in a short period of time, I.E. two charges for exactly 10.00. It would pop up as a dup(licate) and require us to hit “yes”.

A station near me (DC area) has an unannounced $50 limit on CC use. When I got cut off, I went in and the attendant told me to just repeat the process. Whether the 2nd charge would have gone through if I hadn’t gone in, I am not sure. I’ll have to try it next time. $100 or even $75 would be fine, but at current prices even a car needs over $50 to fill up.

There is a station here in Chicago with a $50 limit, and it actually stops the pump at $48. The sad thing is, I have started to it hit when filling up our 99 Camry. When I do hit the limi, I just swipe the card a second time and finish up.

In there I discussed about the absurdity of such a low limit, but apparently you are allowed to swipe your card multiple times at the same pump, to bypass the $75 limit. Since credit cards collect extra fees per transaction, that just means more cost to the gasoline stations.

Credit card companies responded that people were allowed to go into the store and swipe there card there for a high transaction, but who’d give up the convenience of swiping at the pump for that.

Just another story about how credit card companies are screwing the little guys.

@rellog: @krunk4ever: Well, it’s also for the CC companies to limit the risk on unsigned CC transactions. Pay at the pump transactions don’t get a signature, so there’s a cap or else they get treated like internet purchases (with an even higher transaction fee rate). Apparently the rate difference is enough for the gas stations to prefer limiting the purchase amount.

@ianmac47: Nothing at all, but that’s not the issue. Gas stations routinely put a hold on your credit card for a fixed amount (in this case $100) regardless of how much you pump. If they put that hold on your account and then let you pump $150 but you only had $100.01 available they’re going to have problems when they go to put through the final charge. If you do two different transactions they’re putting two different holds and won’t run into that issue. This makes perfect sense and has nothing to do with their profit margin or making you go into the store (although I’m sure they love that too!)

This is nothing new at all. Filled the U-Haul last year, it needed $109. Pump slowed and stopped at $100. Hung up the gas, put the card in again, and topped it off.

$100 is probably the right amount, since that’s the hold they’ll put on the card. If this is inconvenient when you’re filling your beast, consider how much MORE inconvenient it is to the vast majority of people that drive cars that take less then $50 to fill to find they can’t use $50+ of their money for a day/week. If the station let you go over the hold amount, they can’t guarantee they’ll be paid. They probably don’t want to take the risk, considering how little profit the stations make on the gas (the real profit is made by the gas company, not the station owner, but the owner is on the hook for people who can’t pay).

So I didn’t read all of the posts to see if this has already been said, but here it goes. I just moved to TX from OH and I used a 17′ moving truck. The 30 gallon gas tank let me with almost no choice in paying more then $75-100 at the pump. If I needed more than the limit I simply replaced the nozzle, waited for the pump to reset and reinstered my card to keep filling up. I figured it was probably the best way to do it because I didn’t feel like dealing with gas station attendants…

I could have sworn that I read an article on here explaining this. There have almost always been $75 limits since as long as I’ve been pumping gas. I don’t really see this as being “sad.” IT’s not like you’re being charged anymore to, OMG, go inside and talk to a human being!

We use only one card for gas fill ups in our house.The card is designated as a ” gas only ” card and has a 5k limit. As a result, we have never had any problems with fill-ups or “holds” affecting our $$.

We drive a convertible, an Explorer, a boat & a motorhome so we frequently run into the limits when filling the tanks. The easiest thing to do is turn off the pump, reset, reinsert card & repeat. Yes, it is a pain when you have to do this 4 times to fill the motorhomes 70 gallon tank but it is easier than going inside and begging the cashier to allow you to buy their product.

Oh and before anyone attacks me for having multiple vehicles, this still is America and I worked and paid for them all. If I want to spend my $$ on gasoline that is my right.

I’m one of those selfish bastards who has done chargebacks on pay at the pump purchases. A Speedway by my house, the cashier would re-run the numbers after the person drove away, for the same amount, resulting in a double charge and the cashier would pocket the double dip. Since the inside reports generate a WHOLE card number, not just last 4, In fact I successfully sued speedway several times as a result of their receitps continuing even as of 3 weeks ago, to display the whole card number. Now when they hand me a receipt, I take both copies and walk out, if they say anything, i tell em, I don’t trust them with my card number, if they want me *NOT* to do a chargeback, they’ll leave me be.

Sometimes the cashiers are just so stupid, they call the cops for theft because I refuse to sign the receipt. So I go on a speedway chargeback spree. Hundreds of hundreds of dollars in chargebacks as a result of them being an ass. And BofA agree’s with my logic,.